Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” became one of the most frequently anthologized stories in 20th-century American literature. In one of the most beautifully rendered titles in the growing library of graphic literary adaptations, Miles Hyman intelligently recasts Jackson’s narrative into graphic novel form, building suspense through his sequences of frozen images. The adaptation’s special resonance comes in part from the identity of the artist: Hyman is Jackson’s grandson. His preface gives a rather brighter impression of Jackson and her husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, than Ruth Franklin’s recent biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, which tells a more detailed and darker tale of the woman behind “The Lottery.”
